by Andrew Eames
I could see it becoming a metaphor in itself, in true Conradian tradition, having its starting point in Western civilization, in the world of broadband and plasma screens, and its destination in a social and political semi-wilderness where wolves still roam. As in Conrad’s African or South American rivers, a journey along its length would be a journey back to the basics of existence, a journey back in time.
With all this in mind, I was contemplating a matey conversation when the Danube and I first met in Donaueschingen. I saw myself drawing up a chair to the river’s edge and throwing a friendly arm around its shoulders, like two cowboys getting together in the saloon before their adventure begins. ‘I hear you’re heading for the Delta? Yup. Well, as it happens, me too.’
And off we’d go, sunset or no.
But you can’t have a matey conversation with a misbehaving toddler, especially if you suspect it of having just nicked someone else’s pram. After my pre-lunch encounter with the poor innocent Brigach, I was beginning to have my doubts whether the Danube should have been allowed to exist at all.
However, the Danube is not blue, and the Black Sea is not black, and nothing en route is quite what it says on the tin. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, 22 kilometres after my optimistic departure from Donaueschingen on my 20-euro set of wheels, the river, on whose very existence my journey depended, suddenly disappeared.
2
Immendingen: the Danube Disappears
Logically, a journey down a river should be done by boat. Given that I would be travelling with the Danube’s very considerable current in my favour, my first thought was of a rowing boat, and calling the resulting book ‘Backwards to the Black Sea’. But on probing a little deeper the boat plan didn’t seem such a good idea. For while the Upper Danube was widely celebrated in books and brochures, the Lower Danube was rarely mentioned in any traveller’s accounts, and my 1994 edition of Exploring Europe by Boat went only as far as Budapest; beyond that, the river went off the edge of the boatie world.
I found a couple of diaries on the Internet about travelling beyond Budapest on a cruise boat, which weren’t very encouraging: evidently the passengers had whiled away the time with napkin-folding demonstrations, strudel-making competitions and taking photographs of lock installations. Reading between the lines, I gathered that beyond Budapest the river became scenically dull, traversing great plains and incarcerated between high embankments to restrain it from invading people’s homes. Huge stretches of riverbank had no real cultural or scenic interest at all, and humanity kept well away unless there was high ground to hand.
The alternatives to cruise boats didn’t sound much better. Those books I did find that narrated small-boat journeys suggested that their authors were forever in awe of the river’s power. They were so anxious about finding moorings and about their own security that they barely left the water or their precious craft, and consequently saw very little of anything on dry land, which wasn’t what I wanted at all. An Italian yacht skipper who posted his log on the Internet went into detail about excessive mooring charges, difficult customs officers, industrial landscapes and debris in the water. It sounded as if he’d had a thoroughly bad time.
So then I did the journey digitally, with the help of Google Earth. Without budging from my front room I swooped down on Donaueschingen, where the palace and its parkland had obviously been captured in the early morning, even before the vitamin-powered pensioners were up, when the railed-in button of the Donauquelle was all but invisible and the embryonic river was still hidden by a curtain of heavy shadow created by the trees. When it finally emerged, the Danube was a thin, weedy thread snared in a bushy beard and where it became more substantial it was regularly blocked by barriers which I later discovered were hydroelectric dams. Plainly they wouldn’t have been circumventable in anything bigger than a canoe.
The first rivercraft I spotted were two speedboats looking like a pair of feather-tailed swifts below Kelheim, where the Main-Donau Canal joined from the north. And here was my very first barge, followed by several more down below Regensburg, where there was big drama on the river. A barge had got stuck, and there were others skewed around it like woodlice chewing on bark, surrounded by a giant stain of mud as their propellers churned at the riverbed. Several skippers were evidently working their engines hard, unaware that their efforts were being captured by a passing satellite.
Then came Passau, whose most noticeable feature was a big railway yard and the luminous green river Inn, filled with meltwater from the Alps, which joined the jade-green Danube. And despite the Inn being the dominant partner and completely recolouring the combined waterway, it suffered from the same unwise marriage as the Breg and Brigach had done, because it too was forced to surrender its name and its bed.
Google Earth’s detail continued as far as Vienna and then, where the river changed from Upper Danube to Lower, it went impressionistic, turning to Van Goghian swirls and Klee-like spangles of colour. Instead of mucky green it became a deep, idealized blue, as if someone in Google’s Politburo had given the command that, in the absence of other info, it should be coloured to match the waltz. Occasionally details would resolve themselves out of the mist, such as the barge clusters below Belgrade, and it looked as if only one of Novi Sad’s three bridges – all destroyed by NATO warplanes in the strikes against Serbia – was functioning normally when the Google camera had been overhead. Below Moldova Veche the banks were plainly steep and inaccessible, and then it all flattened out again and the Romanian side was covered in tiny strips, a carpet of rectangles in leftover colours of heather, russet and rust, offcuts from a lino factory. For hundreds of kilometres there was very little sign of substantial settlement anywhere near the river.
Eventually my mouse passed the point where the Black Sea Canal struck off out to Constanta, on the sea coast, but the river itself turned north, started to lose its composure and to fray distractedly into subsidiary channels. Finally it sprawled, exhausted and disintegrating, into the Delta, which looked like one of those school science projects where you take an unknown liquid and drop it on to blotting paper to see it separate into bands of constituent colours. My mouse could go no further.
So what sort of boat could cope with all these differing river states? A boat that was portable enough to get round the dams of the upper reaches; a boat that was powerful enough to cope with what was sometimes a 10 m.p.h. stream and which was fast enough to speed me through the sluggish, boring bits. It would have to be a boat big enough to sleep in, substantial enough to be spotted on a barge’s radar after dark and secure enough for me to feel comfortable about locking it up and leaving it occasionally. This wonder-boat would be waiting for me at the top of the river, primed and ready to go; it wouldn’t cost me much money, and it would be something I could easily sell to the fishermen of the Delta when my journey was done, despite the fact that they lived in what was essentially a barter economy and had no money. In short, it was a boat that didn’t exist.
It was pretty much at this point that I started to re-read Patrick Leigh Fermor, the British travel writer who’d set out in 1933, aged eighteen, to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. The resulting books – A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water – are travel classics, and much of the route they describe lies along the Danube. A third volume (to describe the cross-country journey through Bulgaria and into Turkey) has not yet appeared, and Leigh Fermor, in his nineties at the time of writing, is cagey about whether it ever will.
The author was someone I had admired from afar, but until that point I wouldn’t have called myself a fan. For him, the world is a great university, full of arts, literature, languages, history, biology, zoology, all of which enrich his work. Returning to his books with almost forensic interest, my admiration of his writing intensified and my resolution to do this journey weakened. How could his account ever be bettered, or even matched? Not by me, for sure, and I wasn’t keen to invite the comparison.
But there was somet
hing else in Leigh Fermor’s books, something which spurred me on. The author picks his way across the cultural tapestry of Europe, teasing away at selected threads until they unravel in his hands, revealing how they work and what binds them together. His account is very much a portrait of an era, of a Europe between the wars, a bucolic place whose old institutions and families were hanging on by their fingernails, about to be hit by a tidal wave of change. A handful of years after his passsing, half of the landscapes he described were smashed under the heel of fascism and vanished behind the expressionless mask of communism.
Today, seventy-five years on, the mask has slipped, the tidal wave has receded, the last lingering puddles have all but evaporated and much of the superficial damage has been repaired, so surely there was a value in retracing his steps, to see whether any of his old, romantic Europe had survived the three-quarter century of brutalization?
Crucially, as far as my logistics were concerned, Patrick Leigh Fermor hadn’t stuck slavishly to the river, and that gave me a wonderful excuse not to do so either. Although his broad intention had been to walk, he’d also travelled by horse, boat and even car, wherever his story led him. I decided to do the same, to use whatever form of transport seemed most appropriate at the time. As it turned out, that would mean bicycle, boat, train, horse, barge, foot and rowing boat. And each stage would become a bigger adventure than the last.
Setting out from Donaueschingen that afternoon via the Fürstenberg Palace park, pursued by the sound of peacocks, it was impossible not to be optimistic. From beneath me came the reassuring susurration of bicycle tyres eating up a dedicated cycle track, and around me stretched carpets of dandelions in excelsis. Nature was in full riot mode, the bushes sizzling with birds and the ground creaking as it was forced asunder by spring’s green shoots hungry for sun. Germany was looking good in a way I’d never really appreciated it could, with embankments of wild flowers, fields of rape, hedgerows of butterflies and distant church spires, shimmering like something new-baked. I had bread, cheese and a bottle of wine in my saddlebag, wind in my hair and a smear of suncream on my nose. The trees genuflected gently at my passing, congratulating me on my freedom and my weeks and months of unadulterated and unpredictable travel that lay ahead.
The Danube, however, was in playful mood, and showed little inclination to get on with the task we were both engaged on. Once it pulled clear of the park’s regimental straitjacket of symmetrical tree lines, it started to roll around the flat valley like a ball-bearing on a plate. Still a toddler in riverine terms, it had already bullied the Breg and Brigach into submission, and now it was plainly enjoying the first chance to stretch its legs, get fat, knock into things and disobey Mother Baar’s ‘Get Thee to the Black Sea’ instruction, as toddlers are wont to do.
That prim, railed-in button of water by the schloss, with its jelly-bubbles and pompous plaques, was already a distant memory, and the burgeoning river had already become a far less predictable thing. Given the right set of circumstances it could transform itself, rise up out of its bed and drown people, no matter how well prepared they thought they were for its bad behaviour. But right now it was unthreatening, unaware of its power, gathering strength by hungrily swallowing tributaries as it moved through an essentially flat land. There was no clear indication why or in which direction it should flow, but move it did, tickled onwards by an average drop of 0.00047 per cent over its 2,840 kilometres – barely worth leaving its bed for – and the rumour that somewhere to the east there was a whole sea waiting for its grand entrance. There was no suggestion that it was about to disappear.
After about a dozen kilometres the land rose up discreetly, disguised in woodland, as instructed by Mother Baar, to prevent the headstrong river making a run for the North Sea or the Mediterranean as all its fellow waterways did. The river, the cycle way, a road and a railway were all funnelled together into a tree-lined throat, four confederates each of whom had a different agenda: the railway was too lazy for corners, the road preferred to avoid trees, the river liked volleying off the valley walls and the cycle way didn’t want any hills, so all four crossed and criss-crossed each other, as if knitting a giant patchwork pullover – a pullover that would eventually turn a lovely mellow red and yellow in autumn, but at this stage of the year was almost fluorescent with new spring.
In the midst of all this were farmers with tankers of diluted winter slurry, spraying it over their fields and thickening the air with the smell of rancid cheese. Cows, recently evicted from winter barns, were browsing bet ween the river’s bends and bellowing happily – or perhaps unhappily, I don’t know, I don’t speak cow. The riverside Hintertupfingens1 were quiet, staked out with a crucifix at either end, with a Rathaus in the middle and a couple of men in boilersuits fixing things in front yards, as men in boilersuits tend to do. I noticed that a couple of farms had proper little baroque-style multifloored schlosses for pigeons and doves mounted on staves in their courtyards, for even pigeons live in castles on the Danube. Most also had stacks of firewood piled up against the walls, a sign of good housekeeping. It reminded me of that much-loved German euphemism, ‘Viel Holz vor der Hütte’ (‘Lots of wood in front of the hut’), aka a well-stacked figure of a woman. Hintertupfingens are full of them.
Approaching Immendingen I crossed the river courtesy of what looked like an old disused barn, which had been knocked out at both ends and swung across the river so cattle could amble through. Just beyond it I was brought up short by a signboard which made a neat pair with Donaueschingen’s ‘Hier entspringt die Donau’.
‘Hier versinkt die Donau’ it declared, with no attempt at an apology. One moment the Danube entspringt, and the next it versinkt again, as if it was a perfectly natural thing to do. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, springt to sinkt. Now you see it, now you don’t. Tempting though it could have been to interpret this as an act of God, demonstrating the transience of earthly matters and thereby the supremacy of the life eternal, there was a perfectly logical explanation. It was all to do with the geology of the Swabian Alps, an area of limestone hills particularly rich in cave systems, as limestone does tend to be, and it was into one of these that the river had disappeared.
I read on, anxiously, because my journey needed – nay, required – a river, this river particularly. The notice said that the Danube vanished completely for 155 days in the year, but the rest of the time there was sufficient water to maintain a surface presence, and as far as I could see this was one of those rest-of-the-year moments. There was still plenty of water. I left the bicycle and walked along the bank to make sure it was going to stick with me through thick and thin, and although I could detect a certain thinning out, it continued merrily enough, at a good healthy size. Certainly the ducks and herons appeared completely unconcerned.
So I returned to my bicycle full of hope, but the next time the path and the river coincided, a couple of miles further on, the Danube had gone. Dematerialized while I wasn’t looking, with no trap-doors left ajar. All that remained were a couple of putrid puddles in the riverbed, which was otherwise largely occupied by smug bushes, rushes and reeds, luxuriating in the unaccustomed space, pretending they belonged. It didn’t look as if a serious amount of water had travelled this way for years.
Barely believing my eyes, I bumped my bicycle across the empty riverbed and deposited it under a bush, treading carefully lest I stood on one of the cracks and ended up being dematerialized too. All that water, gone. Fish and all.
My first thought was that the Breg and the Brigach had finally worked out a way to exact their revenge, and had somehow pulled the plug. In fact, the underground geology of the area is so arranged that most of the water masquerading as the Danube over that first 22 kilometres (which is heavily Breg- and Brigach-impregnated anyway) disappears underground and never reappears in the Danube riverbed at all, which makes the whole source-of-the-Danube debate pretty pointless. Seditious underground river-courses subvert it southwards to release it into Lake Constance, which forms the
headwaters of the Rhine. So only when it rains hard does the source of the Danube actually keep its head above ground sufficiently to feed the Danube proper and end up heading east to the Black Sea; the rest of the time it evades Mother Baar’s carefully arranged attempts to direct it, ducks out of sight sans ducks, and ultimately ends up going due north instead. How badly behaved is that!
An empty riverbed is a depressing sight, whichever way it is headed, and wherever it is in the world. It carries a more disturbing absence than a disused railway line or even a row of empty houses, because rivers represent the essence of life. For many kilometres after Immendingen I pedalled alongside a pathetic string of puddles, barely daring to look at them, lest they too shrank away into the earth with shame under my stare. The bed refilled only gradually, a poor sickly dribble contributed by tributaries, and it wasn’t until the town of Tuttlingen that it could really be counted as a proper river again with anything approaching a decent cleavage. Even then it was shored up by a weir at the end of town, working like a padded bra to produce a fuller cup for the benefit of Tuttlingen’s strollers. The Danube was back, but it was no longer the vigorous, impetuous toddler that had departed Donaueschingen, full of spirit. This was its anorexic, indecisive distant relative, and henceforth it would be regularly bullied to keep it on track on its route to the east.
* * *
On the outskirts of Tuttlingen the cyclepath ran alongside a small industrial estate. This was my first real taste of manufacturing along the river, with a collection of small companies producing the likes of dental instruments, computer accessories and egg noodles. Germany is full of small-scale manufacturing units like these, enterprises that had their origin in the economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder, of the post-war years. These enterprises have chosen to remain family-owned and specialist for the last five decades, only changing what they do to make the business better, not necessarily bigger.
